The Penguin update sent a strong message that not knowing SEO basics is going to be dangerous in the future. You have to have the basics down or you could be at risk. Penguin is a signal from Google that these updates are going to continue at a rapid pace and they don't care what color your hat is, it's all about relevance. You need to take a look at every seemingly viable "SEO strategy" with this lens.

Dave said it well, Ron is one of the names in the SEO industry you might not know but he's been critical for us at Distilled at launching our NYC office. He really has taught us an immense amount about how to do business and I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of what he's outlined here.

Very true, that's where Google is going and as progressive marketers that's where I think we should all be headed. Right now there are lots of "details" but some day those will all be gone, and then there will just be people who are good at marketing.

Hi Anindya, I think Google is *trying* to serve up the most relevant results to the user but we are far, far away from a perfect world particularly when it comes to longtail searches. There have even been plenty of examples of pure spam ranking like the "car insurance" example someone posted here on SEOmoz a few months ago. In aggregate I think we are seeing more relevant results than ever before but there's always examples to the contrary.

One more thing to note, for true rank tracking the best way to get clean results is to check results with an incognito type browser (and in my experience not Chrome) you could be seeing your site with personalized results.

That is a fantastic quote, treating SEO as if it were independent of updates has always worked for me as well. It can be a tough sell to say, no you shouldn't put all that targeted anchor text in your links even though you might rank immediately. I think those are the important conversations to have and puts SEO into a larger conversation of what is the vision for your website? What is it going to be doing for you in 1 year, 5 years or 10 years?